Michael Idinopulos's Blog on Social Software in the Enterprise

April 2008

April 24, 2008

One of the questions I get a lot is "What do you use a wiki for?" It's a fundamental question, but I've been frustrated for a while at how long-winded and imprecise the answers are that people give to it. So my Socialtext colleagues and I spent some serious time around the whiteboard talking about patterns we're seeing--not sociological or usability patterns, but patterns of business value being generated using wikis and other forms of social software. We distilled them into 4 core solution areas. I posted a page on them in Socialtext Customer Exchange, but I think it's worth re-posting here. If you'd like to read more, Ross Mayfield talks about the 4 solution areas in a recent interview with CIO Magazine.

---Based on our experience with hundreds of customers, we have identified
four core solution patterns that we see across customers. They're not
the only ways to use a wiki, but they pop up in almost every enterprise
deployment we do, regardless of industry. They are excellent examples
of ways that wikis can help companies solve urgent, high-impact
business needs. They provide a good starting point for any manager
thinking about the business value of better collaboration. They're also
a good way for internal champions of wikis and Enterprise 2.0 to engage
colleagues in business benefits and potential opportunities.

Collaborative Intelligence

Collaboration across a distributed sales force is extremely important.
Sales reps needs current versions of critical materials (e.g.,
marketing materials, the latest product specs) from Marketing and
Product Development. Out in the field, reps are constantly gathering
critical information about customers, competitors, and channel partners
which needs to be bubble up to the center to inform product design and
messaging. Moreover, sales reps are always reaching out to each other
to ask questions, post observations, and pick up on the latest "buzz"
from around the network.

Traditional
collaboration across sales networks is rife with inefficiency and
missed business opportunity. Most reps do not have a single place to go
where they can reliably find the most recent product and marketing
materials. Valuable competitive data gathered in the field is either
not captured or bottled up in highly structured call reports.
Conversations across reps are lost in the river of email.

A Collaborative Intelligence wiki can solve these problems. By creating
a "one-stop shop" for the sales network, managers can greatly improve
both the dissemination of critical information to the field, and the
organized capture of critical information from the front lines.
Collaborative Intelligence wikis typically include the latest marketing
and product information updated frequently by Marketing and Product
Groups, and robust discussion threads for reps to post questions and
report observations from the field.

Participatory Knowledgebase

Timely access to the relevant up-to-date knowledge is critical in many
areas, but especially to call centers, where success is literally
measured in seconds. Call center agents need to quickly put their hands
on the precise knowledge required to solve a customer's problem. This
is especially challenging when the calls in question deal with
exceptions, and agents can't simply rely on the standard "script".
Precious minutes drain away as agents try to figure out who has
experience with these exceptional questions or try to solve them for
the first time.

Call
center managers are finding their traditional knowledge management
systems increasingly poorly equipped to handle exceptions. Rigid
information taxonomies, complex templates, and elaborate approval
processes delay by as long as 6 weeks the process of getting knowledge
from an agent's head to the system. And in many cases, agents are so
frustrated by their systems that they do not contribute at all.

A wiki-based Participatory Knowledgebase can solve this problem. By
making it really quick and easy (and fun!) for agents to post
questions, comments, tips, and tricks, the wiki dramatically
accelerates the rate at which new knowledge is posted and disseminated.
In such customers as Dell and Symantec, for example, we have seen
knowledgebases grow to thousands of pages in relatively short periods
of time. The result is not just a valuable knowledge asset, but a
noticeable reduction in average call time.

Flexible Client Collaboration

In many industries, and especially professional services, seamless
collaboration with clients is critical. Attorneys, consultants,
accountants, bankers, and other advisers need to be in constant contact
with their clients. They iterate frequently on documentation with
multiple versions which need to be managed and vetted. They are
constantly answering questions, discussing approach, giving and
receiving feedback. All of this needs to be done on tight time-frames
with busy professionals who spend a lot of time on the road and in
airports.

Most
client collaboration today happens through email. Documents are emailed
back and forth with titles like "Draft of 2/1", "Draft_Jane_Edits".
Comments are posted in reply to all emails which become harder to
follow with each new reply. In the middle of it all is the busy
partner, drowning in hundreds of emails a day from multiple projects.

Wiki-based client collaboration is different. By setting up private
wiki workspaces, shared directly with their clients, professional
services teams have a single, easy-to-manage place where they can put
all the materials related to a project or client: letters of proposal,
powerpoint documents, legal filings, product designs, to-do lists,
meeting notes, etc. Because clients have access to the shared
collaboration wiki, they can easily access the latest version of
materials, and offer comments, questions, and feedback right in the
wiki. The result is a satisfied client who can always find the latest
materials and feels truly integrated with project team.

Business Social Networks

In today's dynamic business environment, few companies can "go it
alone." Leading companies recognize the importance of surrounding
themselves with an ecosystem of customers, suppliers, distributors,
resellers, and other types of business partners. These relationships
are invaluable, both for the direct value they provide and for the
insights and feedback that a thoughtful partner can provide to a
company.

The
value of these business networks is limited by the fact that most
interactions with customers and partners happens 1-1: A manager talks
with his channel partners, or exchanges emails with a customer. Far
more valuable, however, is a forum where channel partners, customers,
and other stakeholders can talk with each other. Wiki-based business
social networks can create conversations where all a company's
strategic stakeholders--internal and external--can talk directly to
each other to share experiences, answer questions, offer feedback to
the company, and ideate on product and service improvements. The result
is a rich source of insights for the company, as well as a highly
energized and committed group of stakeholders.

April 17, 2008

Socialtext announced two major product announcements today: Socialtext People and Socialtext Dashboard. I'm excited about Dashboard, but People really rocks my world.

A lot of the coverage of People is calling it "Facebook for the enterprise". That's a fair description, but it misses what it is to me the coolest thing about People: Its in-the-flow-ness.

I love the way Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites organize content around people and relationships. What I don't love is how very above-the-flow they are. Facebook and LinkedIn are places where you go to "network". Unless you're under 25 (which, for better or worse, I'm not), they're detached from the rest of your daily activity. A person's activities or experiences show up on Facebook or LinkedIn only when somebody makes a special effort to put them there. As a result, most of a person's activities don't ever show up. (For instance: I've run dozens of user feedback surveys, but you wouldn't know it from my LinkedIn profile.)

A few years ago, Lee Kempler and I wrote in the McKinsey Quarterly that companies need better ways to connect employees to each other based on their interests and expertise. Our core insight was that what matters most is not what people say about themselves, but what people's experience says about them. In other words, it is what people do in-the-flow not what they do above-the-flow that makes them interesting to connect and network with. The missing ingredient of social networking is connecting to in-the-flow activity that makes a person's profile and relationships meaningful.

Enter Socialtext People. Socialtext People isn't just an inside-the-firewall social networking tool. It's a networking tool that integrates with Socialtext wikis where people are doing their in-the-flow work: posting messages, drafting meeting agendas, taking notes, documenting processes, spec'ing products, and so on. You can see what people are actually doing, not just what they say they're doing. You can also see who they're doing it with.

That makes for an incredibly rich, detailed, nuanced view of a person's interests, activities, and expertise. It makes Socialtext a platform for a whole bunch of new and powerful activities:

Identify true experts across the organization on even the most minute topics

Find and connect with colleagues across the organization working on similar topics

Conduct due diligence on internal "hires" for internal transfer or short-term projects

Monitor employee or colleague activity

Identify key influencers in the organization for change communications and post-merger management

April 04, 2008

I was just checking out the results of the recent AIIM Survey on Enterprise 2.0. (My company, Socialtext, was one of the underwriters.) There's a lot of great material there about how managers perceive Enterprise 2.0. I was particularly struck by how prominently culture appears as a theme in the responses. There is a view out there that an organization needs to have a "culture of collaboration" culture in order to successfully employ wikis and other Enterprise 2.0 tools.

That view is dead wrong. I've seen wikis thrive in un-collaborative cultures. I've seen wikis fail in collaborative cultures. I've seen wikis thrive in an organization alongside failing wikis in the same organization.

Even within "non-collaborative" cultures, people have to work with other people. We've seen lots of examples of wikis being introduced into those cultures in very safe ways--to streamline and simplify existing business interactions within existing organizational silos. What tends to happen then, often quite organically, is that the members of the wiki start interacting in new and different ways enabled by the wiki. Then the wiki is discovered by colleagues in other groups who work with participants of the wiki and want to be connected to the network. As they join in, the wiki starts generating new interaction patterns and norms that cut across organizational silos. Voila! You now have cultural change, as workers collaborate in new ways with their colleagues across organizational silos.

When managers complain that their organizations "just aren't collaborative enough" to embrace Enterprise 2.0, it's probably because they're trying to go straight to the sexy stuff--all-encompassing, above-the-flow "internal Wikipedias" where everyone shares everything they know with everyone else. There are a few places where that kind of thing can thrive immediately, but most companies need to work their way up to openness, beginning with incremental operational benefits derived from better collaboration within existing boundaries.

Culture is a destination on the collaboration journey, not a prerequisite for taking the first step.

I was talking today with Michael Kieran, our newest Customer Success Manager at Socialtext, about structure in wikis. As I've blogged about before, it's very important for a wiki to have some structure. WIthout structure, people get confused, lost, and according to my friend Barry Schwartz the author of the Paradox of Choice, depressed. At the same time, there's nothing more annoying than an overstructured website, where you have to click through link after link after link to get to the content you care about. How do we reconcile those two observations?

The answer is that a good wiki is structured around a pyramid, rather than a hierarchy.

Content in a wiki should never be more than one click away. Beyond the first page of the wiki (and maybe not even then), there should never be pages that are just pages of links. At the same time, all of that content should follow the Pyramid Principle on which these are articulated at a high level first, then articulated in more detail further down. In other words, every wiki page should have content, but that content should contain structure (via links) that take the user down into more detail, or sideways into related topics.

Wikipedia is a great example of this, and I think it's one of the reasons why Wikipedia is so popular. Every Wikipedia entry has content. You don't have to click through a bunch of links to get to the good stuff. At the same time, each entry is chock full of links that take you into greater detail.

However, there is one important way in which the pyramid metaphor breaks down on a wiki: a link on a wiki doesn't necessarily take you into greater detail; it may take you sideways into a different topic.